The company that made the fur-trimmed parkas worn by Liberal MP Justin Trudeau's family in this season's Christmas card has defended the use of coyote fur as "sustainable."

The prominent animal-rights group PETA this week denounced the holiday greeting card that features a picture of Trudeau, his wife Sophie, and their two young children wearing coats by Canada Goose. The family is enrobed in thick fur trim lining the garments' hoods and huddling behind a fur blanket.

But the Toronto-based company's response to the criticism raises the question: Does the word sustainable really mean anything?

The short answer? Not much.

The term entered the environmental vocabulary in the 1980s in a book by Gro Harlem Brundtland, the former prime minister of Norway.

Suddenly, every company and every government was calling itself sustainable.

Worried about car emissions causing global warming? Mazda, famous for the "Zoom-Zoom" commercials, now has Sustainable Zoom-Zoom, a commitment adopted in 2007 to cut some emissions. Coal and oil industries claim to be sustainable too — or at least "green."

For Dani Reiss, CEO of Canada Goose, the word means that his company deals with people in northern Canada who have lived off the land for thousands of years, always in balance with nature. (Coyote and wolf fur have a history of use on parkas because they resist the buildup of frost near the wearer's face.)

"They're often looked to as a model of sustainability in the sense that they don't want to catch the last coyote," Reiss said. "They're stewards of their own environment, as opposed to using endangered species or buying from and supporting fur farms."

But the wider use of the term bothers some people with experience in environmental fields.

Michael Perley, now with the Ontario Campaign for Action on Tobacco, was an acid rain campaigner in the 1980s when sustainability burst on the scene. He says it's a way to avoid dealing with specific, measurable improvements "and a way into much vaguer, larger-scale programs that some companies particularly launch . . . You can't evaluate or assess it in any meaningful way."

Perley calls it "a big problem for the public," which is increasingly swamped by such messaging. "How exactly can you figure out what you should be believing?"

Ottawa naturalist and consultant Dan Brunton says he avoids the word sustainable in his own work.

It's one thing to say that some plants or animals are "self-sustaining," he says. That has a clear meaning: "We're saying the thing can keep itself going.

"But sustainability, whenever there's a human advantage involved, always comes out as meaning 'maximum utilization.' And that's not what the term is intended to mean. It's been bastardized."

However, sustainability does have a clearer meaning in dealing with animals, says veteran wolf and coyote researcher John Theberge.

It means that animals are hunted or trapped without reducing their overall numbers.

Theberge has done extensive wolf research in Ontario's Algonquin Park, and recently retired from the University of Waterloo. He says if anything is sustainable, it's likely the versatile coyote.

With coyotes, the question becomes more one of personal feeling, Theberge says. Some people feel they are "vermin," while others feel they should have the right to protection.

But overall, coyote numbers aren't in danger.

The animal was native only to the Prairies before Europeans arrived and cleared land for farming; it has since expanded its range to hunt rabbits and other small animals in open fields — even in cities — right to the Atlantic coast.

"They are an enormously resilient species compared with the wolf. They have a higher reproductive output. The females can breed at a year of age instead of two years old," Theberge says. "So while the wolf populations have suffered from human exploitation across North America, coyote populations have thrived.

"Their numbers are probably better today than they ever were. So then it becomes almost an animal-rights (question)."

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